Francisco Sepulveda

Francisco Sepulveda was born in Chile in 1977. After a childhood spent in the countryside and surrounded by nature, he studied drawing, painting, and printing at the School of Fine Arts in the capital city of Santiago. He went on to experiment with and develop his printmaking techniques in Wilfredo Lam’s workshop.

His extensive world travels introduced him to the artistic universes of many different traditional cultures. He most recently lived in Mozambique before moving to France, to the town of Ferney-Voltaire.

Since 1995, he has exhibited his work numerous times in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States.
His work has been acquired by prestigious public and private collections, including the New York Public Library, the visual art collection at ETH Zurich, Spain’s National Library in Madrid, France’s National Library in Paris, Belgium’s Royal Library in Brussels, the Jenisch Museum in Vevey, as well as the Museo Nacional del Grabado in Buenos Aires.

In his works, Francisco Sepulveda wields the unique mythology that he has created, inspired by the myths and legends of South America as well as by the ones he’s gleaned from other traditional cultures during his travels.
His work abounds with reflections of ancestral animist beliefs, from the time when the connections between humans and nature were not so broken: in this playful universe, large animals with magical auras carry men on their backs, half-human, half-animal or half-plant chimeras draw the viewer’s eye with their hieratic faces, while captainless boats propel their passengers to the Other World, that place of spirits and dreams.
There are hints of highly diverse inspirations tracing their way through Francisco Sepulveda’s work: compositions echoing the surrealism of de Chirico at times, perspectives evoking mediaval illuminations, or the way that surfaces like the sky or the ground are filled with repeated symbols, alluding to the traditional aboriginal paintings that depict “Dream Time”. The different influences infusing his work stand out in that they are all representations of spiritualities that can only be suggested by planes of intense color and a nearly naive figuration of the beings who populate them.

All of this comes together to give Francisco Sepulveda’s work a singular and magical power: each of his pieces is a window, a passageway opening out onto a highly unique world and yet abundant with universal insights.